Question

Jada walks up to a tank of water that can hold up to 10 gallons. When it is active, a drain empties water from the tank at a constant rate. When Jada first sees the tank, it contains 7 gallons of water. Three minutes later, the tank contains 5 gallons of water. b) How many more minutes will it take for the tank to drain completely?

Answer 1

It will take 7.46 minutes for the tank to drain completely

Explanation:

The first thing we need to do is to find the rate at which the tank empties.

The rate can be found easily by dividing the amount of water leaving the tank by the time the water takes to leave the tank.

Jada notices 2 gallons of water leave the tank in three minutes. ( The two gallons was obtained from 7-5 = 2).

The rate at which the tank is being emptied is 2 gallons ÷ 3 minutes = 0.67 gallons per minute.

The next step is to use this rate to estimate the amount of time it will take for the tank to be empty.

For the tank to be empty, it has to lose all 5 gallons of water it has.

it loses this 5 gallons at the rate of 0.67 gallons per minute.

We can set up a simple relation as shown below:

1 minute 0.67 gallons are lost

x minutes 5 gallons are lost

By cross multiplying, we have that

x = 5/0.67 = 7.46 minutes

It will take 7.46 minutes for the tank to drain completely